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A New Framework for Modeling Emissions from Volatile Chemical Products
Citation:
Seltzer, K., B. Murphy, K. Isaacs, V. Rao, AND H. Pye. A New Framework for Modeling Emissions from Volatile Chemical Products. AAAR Annual Conference, Raleigh, North Carolina, October 02 - 09, 2020.
Impact/Purpose:
Volatile chemical products (VCPs) are an increasingly important source of anthropogenic organic emissions with new methods suggesting the US EPA's NEI could be biased low by factors of 2-3. We develop VCPy, a new framework to model emission factors from VCPs throughout the United States, with additional applications to spatially allocate these emissions to regional and local scales.
Description:
Volatile chemical products (VCPs) are an increasingly important source of anthropogenic organic emissions. Among these sources are everyday items, such as personal care products, household and institutional cleaners, architectural coatings, pesticides, adhesives, and fragrances. These emissions have long been accounted for in the US EPA's National Emission Inventory as the solvent sector, but new inventory methods suggest these estimates could be biased low by factors of 2-3. As the influence of VCPs on secondary air pollution grows in relevance, the need to resolve these differences becomes paramount. Here, we develop VCPy, a new framework to model emission factors from VCPs throughout the United States, with additional applications to spatially allocate these emissions to regional and local scales. In this framework, fate and transport assumptions are a function of the use timescale for assigned product categories and the evaporation timescales of individual compounds within these categories are a function of physiochemical properties. Since ingredients in these product categories are considered individually, determination of speciated emission profiles is explicit. This approach also enables quantification of emission volatility distributions and the abundance of different compound classes. We test the sensitivity of the magnitude of emissions to uncertain parameters, such as use and evaporation timescales, through Monte Carlo analysis, evaluate the inventory using ambient observations, and map emissions to common chemical mechanisms for ease of research use in the chemical transport modeling community.
